The exhibition ‘A Book of Burning Matches’ features a number of new and existing works by artists already present in the archive including David Edward Allen, Hans Op de Beeck, Stefan Brüggemann, Ben Cain, Tina Gverović, Barnaby Hosking, and David Price. The new interventions are constructed as responses, while other works can be seen as partner-pieces to earlier installations.

Though they may be seen as autonomous works, they also function as markers in the exhibition. They offer partial glimpses of the practices that de Oliveira and Oxley have been engaged in over the decades, defined primarily by close working relationships between artists and curators. Curatorial themes such as theatricality, location, immersion, and material process recur throughout, and are underscored by the textual, performative action of writing installation: defining, wiping, resiting, and rewriting.

In this way, exhibition-making and writing are presented as forming a single productive entity, defined by a continuous, codependent process.

In asking artists to collaborate in this exhibition, they step back into the past in order to recall and examine aspects of their earlier works, and to devise responses that may render memory tangible for a moment.

In this search, the previous work becomes a document to be consulted, and then overwritten in the manner of a palimpsest, where each new act of writing incorporates and erases the previous one.

These works punctuate the visual environment of the exhibition, finding echoes and references in the abundance of documentary material; a sonic score, the result of a series of sustained conversations, resulting in a collaboration with sound-curator Alejandro Ball completes the immersive quality of the exhibition.